1-17-14 International Travel Never Goes Like You Think It Will, No It Doesn't

4 AM: Typing at 4 AM because my internal clock is still set to Korean time, and thinks that it's early afternoon and therefore time to be productive. By the time I finally adjust to American time, it'll be time to fly back to Korea and experience the shakeup all over again. So far I don't have a sleep schedule so much as a time-when-sleep-attacks and a time-when-sleep-is-unobtainable. Like a cat; when you want sleep, it's gone and when you don't want it, it won't leave you alone.

But I'm happy. I'm with the parents and the siblings and it's like I've never left. I've seen my grandma, and I'll soon see my aunts and uncles and cousins and my church family and maybe even my former American students, so I'm looking forward to that. Got out of the house for the first time in two days this previous night--saw my baby brother's basketball game, and he's a beautiful doll of a child. I missed cheering him on at sporting events.

I'm surprised at how undramatic and non-eventful it is to be back home. I was picturing an arrival home with a swelling soundtrack and a 360 camera swirling around to capture our tearful hellos, but instead it was just nice and calm, like I'd only been away to college for two weeks instead of on the complete-other-side of the world for 5 months.

And now I know I can get home! Having never visited (let alone lived) in another country, I didn't know how hard or easy it might be to return home. In August, the move to Korea was such a big step it felt like I was hopping on a steam boat to the New World, never to see the motherland again. But, no. Flying internationally is no fun (and I mean reeeeally no fun, more on that later), but once it's over, you're back with the ones you love. It's so...simple. You can go and you can come back. My mind is kind of blown by how I can have two homes and move between them. It's like discovering I can step into the linen closet and beam myself to Narnia, but with a four-hour layover.

Now the flight story.

I was healthy and hadn't lost any possessions when I got home, but I did look decidedly run down and a bit fuzzy, like a rumpled squirrel.

My flight from Incheon to San Francisco was...12 hours? Not as bad as the 15-hour flight from Chicago to Incheon on the way over, but still so eerie and daunting it was a hairsbreadth away from an episode of the Twilight Zone.

To clarify my stance on flying; short flights (1 to 6 hours long) are fun. They are adventurous. You eat airplane snacks, you watch airplane movies, you do light reading and listen to your ipod. Short flights make you feel all special, like you are Such A Person who is going The Places and doing The Things.

Long flights (8-15 hours) make you forget your ties to humanity. The essence of your mortal soul, crafted and put into your fragile body by the Lord himself, begins to tarnish like a silver spoon left in the screwdriver drawer.

Or maybe it's just me.

Behold, Time Hath Looped In Upon Itself.

I learned a teensy bit from the last flight experience. I packed a full water bottle, so I did not again enter the Thirst Dimension. It was glorious--I was no longer at the mercy of the drink cart, though it came by often enough. I also packed lotion, so every time the top layer of my hands threatened to crack apart, I could soothe it into staying with me.

But I could not sleep. Maybe one of those little life-vest neck pillows could have helped, but I doubt it. I was in economy, so space for my feet to move and knees to bend was not something that existed. I was seated between a middle-aged Korean man and an elementary-aged Korean girl on the aisle side, and the darling girl never made a peep any of the five times I had to crawl over her to get exercise or brush out my squirrelly hair.

The sound system on my seat wasn't working, so I could observe the in-flight movies but I couldn't hear them, and the subtitles were in Chinese. You haven't lived until you've sat in a totally silent airplane under the darkness of a simulated night while endlessly scanning the meaningless Mandarin subtitles of "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: 2".

I Have No Way Of Knowing If This Image Made Sense In Context.

The crazy thing was that Minji, the adorable little 6th-grade girl beside me, was fine. She sat through the whole flight like a small adult, she slept a little, and generally looked like she was not coming apart at the seems.

While I laid over on my food tray and wedged my head catty-corner in the space between the seats, hoping nobody sent an elbow my way. My neck vertebrae smooshed together a bit while doing so, but I probably got 15 minutes of semi-sleep out of this position before simply flopping forward with the airplane pillow between my forehead and the seatback in front of me.

Pictured: Position Number 1.

I thought it would never ever ever endm but as in August the flight did end and the last two hours were by far the easiest. I said goodbye to sweet baby Minji and wished her luck on her camp (she was going to Boston for Social Sciecne camp), I grabbed my bags (and my life-giving water bottle) and waved farewell to the sweet flight attendant who had praised my Korean speaking ability and who informed me as I got off the plane that someone with my verbal skills was bound to get a Korean husband soon (not if he sees the horror that is me trying to sleep on an international flight, I won't!).

In San Francisco, there was a 3-hour wait that stretched into more like 5 hours because something was wrong with the heating-cooling system on the flight to Paris, so United Airlines gave our plane (the Houston plane) to the Paris people, then fixed the heat on the Paris plane and gave it to us, eventually.

The flight to Houston was fun because it was daylight and nobody was sitting beside me! I had some nice conversation with a sweet girl from Texas, two seats down, and I watched movies and read a book, just as if I hadn't been awake for 30 hours. 

But I began to foresee the scheduling problem that would ensue when we landed. Thanks to the Paris Kerfuffle, my plane would be landing in Houston at 9:05 PM. My flight to Huntsville was scheduled to leave from Houston at 9:05 PM. When I landed, United had vouchers waiting for all of us with connecting flights--none of us could get another flight until afternoon of the next day, so they were sending us to a nearby hotel, with vouchers for dinner and breakfast. 

I was simply stuck in Texas and losing a half-day with my family, but other people had it far worse.

One woman needed to get to New Orleans right away because her elderly mother was being cared for by people, and she couldn't afford to pay them an extra half-day. I listened as an employee told her that if she hurried, she could possibly get to a far-off terminal in time to catch her New Orleans flight, which hadn't yet left for some reason. I'm pretty sure he was just trying to get rid of her, because he didn't offer to find her a cart for transportation or even try to call and see how long her flight might be delayed and to let them know she was coming. 

As she tromped off to the gate in question, it looked like this employee was wasting the time of a tired woman who was worried about her mother. At 11 PM, she and I wound up at the same motel, so I know she missed the flight. I'm sure the service staff had had a long day of dealing with exhausted and irate (if not downright nasty) passengers, but really...that's not a good way to treat people. Even, "I'm so sorry, there's nothing I can do" would have been honest.

I did manage to get my 3 PM Huntsville flight switched to a 8 AM Birmingham flight, a destination my family could still pick me up from. But the matter of what to do overnight was not settled--the hotel I had a voucher for was not one I had heard of before, so it sounded potentially shady and I didn't want to leave the safety of the airport. 

But! Once I went down the escalator, there was no going back up--I was locked away from the food and the stores, which had all been shutting down anyway. I was stranded in the baggage claim area, where the only food was in vending machines, the pay phones were pricey, and the wifi for computers was non-existent. 

My Temporary Home.

I made an angry pay phone call to my Daddy. "I've been awake forever. The food is up there and I am down here, and I don't want to go to this maybe-shady hotel." Oh, I was whining to beat the band. Spoiled toddlers had nothing on me. Daddy knew I was way past using clear logic, but he hinted that a few hours of rest in a hotel room beat chilling in the baggage claim any day.

He was right. 

I waited outside for a hour, searching for the shuttle to the inn. I struck up an impromptu friendship with a girl bound for Buenos Aires who raced mountain bikes competitively, plus a military girl who was being deployed to the Middle East. Finally I got to the hotel (which was not shady) and got a real dinner delivered (Texas Jalapeno Burger), plus some actual sleep. Daddy, you are a genius. 

Next morning, I took the shuttle back to the airport and sat across from a young mother with two sets of twins--2-year-old girls and 6-year-old boys. The talkative 6-year-old twin sat by me and we discussed how cold it is in Canada, how hot it is in Hawaii, and how I sound just like his friend Ellie, though I don't look like her. Darling child.

At the airport, I went through security again and the TSA agent patted down my hair. MY HAIR. My braid was apparently of a size where it could conceal weapons. So. If I ever need to hide something, I'll know where to go. 

The flight wasn't bad, and Daddy and my brothers were waiting for me on the other side. Flying is crazy, but God looks out for his children and maybe teaches them a little patience as they go. 

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1-15-14 Home in the States!

10 PM: After 5 months abroad, I'm home in Alabama for a 2-week vacation.

All the things happened on this trip...I'm getting the hang of international travel, and I'm happy to be home!!!! But I still can't sleep on planes though, so that means I got about 4 hours of sleep out of the last 40.

This Is Me, But Less Dignified.

1-11-14 Video of the Bridge, and Artistic Yosep

1 PM: Only had Yosep in class today, and we made some art.


This morning, the school was extra-empty, nearly devoid of even teachers, but one of the men who used to pretend I didn't exist greeted me first with a bright, "안녕하세요!" That set a nice tone for the day.

The heat in my classroom wasn't turned on, but I settled in there anyway because...I don't know why. It would have been dead easy to hunt down a person and ask them to turn the heat on. But I just sat in my mittens and coat, learning Korean by myself.

When it became apparent that nobody was coming (so I thought), I went down the hall and gave some of the Paris Baguette bread I bought for my students to a pair of cutiepie first-grade students who appear to be our school's other pair of twins. They always say hello to me like I'm a special part of their day, and they've been sneaking up to the door of my classroom to peer in. Yesterday I surprised them by crouching low and and opening my class door, so our eyes were on the same level. They ran off shrieking like it was a divine sort of joke. English Sem is funny.

Later, I saw Dongseok so I gave him and Beomjoon and their friends the remainder of the bread and cookies, to which Dongseok said, "Oh yeah, thanks baby!" This child. A few days ago, he saw me on the street while he was walking ahead of me, and he looked back about five times to make sure I was watching him. Needs his attention like a flower needs water.

Then just as I was learning how to conjugate irregular verbs ending in ㄷ, Yosep rolled in! So our low-attendance winter camp just got as low-attendy as it can: it was only me and Yosep today, so we made art. We drew science fiction cities and labeled the parts of our cities in hangul and English.

This was after I had exhausted a few other possibilities. I had stuff prepared, but not the kind of stuff you could do with one kid, because it was competitive. I tried word games, then I tried a Powerpoint Rorshach test for a few minutes, then I suggested cards and Monopoly, then I asked him what he wanted to do. No response. Yosep's intelligent but he's not good at decision-making, even when he understands the question perfectly. He's very peaceful and laid back. He wants me to come up with something good for us to do.

So I decided to whip out the art supplies and have us both draw future cities. I can scarcely draw. And for ten minutes, he just watched me draw and label the parts of my picture in two languages; I thought this was another failed idea since he wasn't trying it out yet. Then I told him to go ahead and try it and HE DID AWESOME. It just took him a while to plan out his city and how he wanted it to go. We drew with pens then used pastels on top of that, smudging the color in with our fingers.

Yosep's.

Yosep made a cool underwater city with a train track leading through the skies to an even cooler floating green city where people watch soccer matches. We worked side by side, and while I added flourishes to my drawing, he used my phone dictionary to look up English words for his picture. I didn't even direct him to do that part--he just knows the routine with us, where we use the dictionary to communicate.

Also, Yosep revealed the he knows the unlock code for my phone. He must have watched my fingers move over the keys enough that he learned it, because he would just reach over and unlock my phone to use the dictionary at different intervals. He looked thrilled when I finally realized that he had cracked the code. I put up a token fuss and pushed his arm, but I let him keep using it. My food and my technology are all yours, kiddo.

My future city, by the way, was a dystopian future where we live in castles suspended upon pink pedestals over a lava ocean, while the stars keep their sad watch over the eternal night.

Mine.

He stayed a few minutes after class to finish, and I sent his picture home with him. He was going to leave it with me, but something told me that it might be nice for him to keep it. I kept mine, too.

On the walk out of school, Laryngitis Seonghoon greeted me while walking along with his little guitar strapped to his back. I couldn't think of anything in Korean to say to him, so I just said, "guitar!" pleasantly and he said, "yes," pleasantly. Smooth words, Leigh. Better slow down with your clever verbosity. Think I saw Deokjae on a bike--some darling boy on a bike greeted me, and he looked Deokjae-ish, under his face-obscuring hat.

Saw 1st-grade Sangyeop over the bridge. When he saw me, he stopped in his tracks, bowed, then took off his hat and tipped his cap to me. Dawww. This is the kid that I was "married" to during a game of Monopoly, the one who hid money from me. I told him his hat looked good and he said thank you.

Got my train ticket for Monday, now to get my new luggage and pack to go home in two days! Wheeeee!
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1-10-14 Funny Yosep, Year of the Tiger, and What the Fox Actually Does Say

12 PM: Good day. I didn't have much in the way of activities planned, but I wanted to try out a new board game with Seongyo. However, it was a game about English logos and in order to win it, not only would have have to have solid English, you'd have to able to answer questions like, "Which Italian restaurant features a Bottomless Bread Bucket deal on weekends?"

In short, it was unplayable unless you were American. Eh. We tried. I attempted to play word games with him and still use the board to advance our pieces, but he decided that was "재미없어요"(jaemieobseo--boring). I muttered, "I'll jaemi your eobseo," under my breath, which is exactly the kind of thing my mother used to say to me when I was complaining, using whatever verb and noun I had most recently said: -"Mom! This popcorn is bland." -"I'll bland your popcorn." That usually confused me enough to stop all arguments.

Nice to know that I'm gradually starting to use every last mom-related speech pattern, right down to the one that didn't usually even make sense in English, and makes even less sense when you throw in Korean syllables. Seongyo didn't know what I was saying, and I didn't either.

Daesung snuck silently into class and stood behind me until I turned around and nearly got startled to death. he was positively gleeful that he actually surprised me.

Yosep came by later, and he's becoming a real favorite. This quiet kid that blended into the crowd and had no distinguishing characteristics was smiling and laughing and chattering up a storm today. It was like he'd been dipped in sunshine--I had no idea he could be so cheerful. He played endless rounds of the Korean-English word game with me:

We were both using my phone dictionary a lot, to check our spelling. I feel like we both learned a lot. 

For a few minutes, I let Yosep play Minecraft on my phone while Seongyo looked up English songs he liked on the internet, then played them for me, Yosep, and Daesung. Daesung didn't really like having someone else in charge of providing the tunes, so he would turn on his phone sometimes before I'd remind him to let Seongyo pick songs for a while.

Seongyo also tried out some Englsih curse words today, just to see how they felt, I guess. I had to correct my boy and tell him not to say "역"(yeok---curses). Daesung doesn't know many English swears, so he kept asking what it was that Seongyo said wrong, thinking he had said something bad in Korean.

Also, after playing that perennial middle-school favorite song, "What Does the Fox Say?" Seongyo started using the phrase, minus the word "say". And he knows how to pronounce "fox" just fine but he was intentionally saying a different word. I went to the white board to write in hangul what "fox" was in Korean (여우--yeou) and what a certain English curse word was in Korean. They are not the same word. You can hear the difference between the two words, and the second isn't one you should use.

And this was part of the way that I learned that Yosep has a hilariously dry sense of humor. After I wrote on the board, he said in Korean, "Sem just cursed, she totally did. I saw it." I corrected, "No, 가르치다...I was teaching you." Yosep smiled over that. If I wasn't learning so much Korean, I'd miss all of Yosep's little jokes. When he saw my red, chipped nail polish, Yosep teased me by saying that I had "witch fingers". I punched his arm for that.

Apropos of nothing, here's a picture of the open area in front of the train station. This is where I saw Seongwonnie last weekend.

Taken Inside the Green Brownie Coffeeshop.

This morning, I looked out the window and saw one of my afterschool first-graders, Chaeho, and I remarked that he was a fun kid. Seongyo said, "Chaeho's nickname is "vegetable"." I cracked up. In Korean, the word for vegetable is chaeso, so the nickname isn't far off base. 

We had a good time, I fed them infinite amounts of bread, and we all learned something.  While playing UNO, I laid down an especially good hand, Yosep said, "Horangi power!" meaning "Tiger power!" He remembered that I said Tiger was my nickname and that I was born in 호랑이띠(horangi-ddi), the year of the tiger.

The boys had me look up "띠" on my dictionary so they could know what it meant in English--I translated it as "zodiac year". In Asian countries (or at least in China, Korea, and Japan...not sure about everywhere else), each calendar year is assigned an animal on a 12-year cycle. 2014 is the year of the Horse, for example. And while there are supposed to be personality traits that go with each year, you don't have to get really astrological or predict-the-future-y with any of this. It's mostly just another way to classify people and remember their ages.

Daesung was thrilled to tell me that he was a Tiger, too--this year's crop of 3rd-graders are exactly 12 years younger than me, so the 3rd-graders are all Tigers, the 2nd-graders are Rabbits, and the 1st-graders are Dragons. Daesung made me laugh when he told me that B-Teacher, who is very strong and tough, is Year of the Mouse. I also tried to explain that in America, almost no one knows their birth-year animal because we don't keep track of years in the same way.

There was also a big conversation with me and Daesung about when I'm leaving Korea for the States, and what the time difference is, and how long the flight takes, and where my plane will be stopping, and why it's not landing in Chicago. I feel like I have actual, grown-up human being conversations with Daesung, despite the language barrier. He knows how to ask interesting questions in Korean, and I can generally understand them and reply with something halfway coherent.

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7 PM: Got back in from the gimbap restaurant, and from buying train tickets to church on Sunday. I'm set for the weekend! Now to buy a new luggage (my suitcase molded in my closet) and to book a train ticket to the airport on Monday. :-) 

1-9-14 Walk-to-School Video, Daesung in Class

12:30 PM  Class was good! It was even colder than anticipated this morning. So. Cold. Weather website says it's -2 Celsius outside (28 Fahrenheit), but with windchill it feels like -18 C  ( 0 F)

This morning, after freezing myself into oblivion, I got to my classroom where Seongyo was waiting. And Daesung came, too--I thought he was jut visiting for a few minutes like he's done every other day of winter camp, but he stayed with us for both class periods, and did the activities with us! So now I've officially taught Daesung in a classroom setting, even though he's 3rd-grade C-class and I would otherwise never get to work with him.

We did a memory game with Daesung, Seongyo, Yosep and Grasshopper-Jeongmin, where there would be a slide of 8 animal drawings, then one or two animals would be missing, and they'd have to say which was gone. But the position of the animals re-arranged with every slide, so it wasn't a simple matter to pick what was different, and for added difficulty the later slides replaced pictures with English words, so the boys had to read the words and spot what was missing.

I was really proud of Seongyo because he started using his phone to take pictures of the first slides, so that when I switched to the second slide, he still had an immediate visual reference. I don't consider that cheating; I consider that to be cleverness. That's real-world problem-solving, seeing a gap in informationa dn figuring out a way to bridge the gap.

Also, the boys are using their phone dictionaries all the time now, since they've seen me using mine. When we did this fun Powerpoint Christmas quiz, Jeongmin and Yosep were continually looking up words like "sleigh" and "Grinch" to make correct answers. Again, this is terribly intelligent. This is them using the resources at their disposal to discover English words and use them for a goal. Eeee so cool.
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1/6/13 Seongwonnie and the Coffee, Fun With Spelling, and Pink Guitar

11:30 AM: Class was good.

But first, what happened yesterday, on Sunday: I had bought a train ticket to Cheonan, the town where my church is, but I was going to have to wait an hour for it to leave. I was feeling grumpy because I can usually get a train within 10-20 minutes of arriving at the station. Now I was going to have to wait and miss most of church because of the gap in the train schedule. I stepped out to get a coffee, and returned to the train station with my Americano-two-sugars in hand.

As I opened the door to step back into the station, I thought I saw a familiar fluffy head and blue jacket. A child was riding around on his bike in the parking lot across the way, and it looked like Seongwonnie from a distance. But I wasn't sure, so I just walked inside and started climbing the massive staircase to get to the waiting area.

As I climbed, I thought "What if that actually was Seongwonnie? What if he follows me in here? What will I do about my Americano-two-sugars when he inevitably tackles me?" You know you're a middle school teacher when you're developing contingency plans for what you'll do in the event of being tackled on the stairs while holding coffee.

And I did hear steps behind me, hurried steps that sounded too heavy to be a kid. I thought it might just be another traveler, but then I felt hands grabbing my waist through my coat and knew who it was. Grabbing with no words is Seongwonnie's standard greeting. I was already standing firmly on a step, so there was no falling or spilling of coffee. I rubbed his head and he smiled at me and we walked up the stairs together.

Inside the station's waiting area, we chatted in mostly-Korean about where I was going. I showed him my ticket, but he still pretended to "order" me a ticket at the machine by pressing in my departure locale and my destination. He took a sip of my Americano-two-sugars and found it too hot for him. I asked where Inha and Yeongchang were and he said he didn't know, before taking another sip of my drink and finding it not as hot as before.

I patted his head some more and he just looked at me with wide, sparkling eyes like he knew he was 100% loved. He seems so neglected at times, it means the world to me to see him happy and cared for, even for just a few minutes. We ended our chat, and he said goodbye to me while absconding with my Americano-two-sugars.

So I set loose a very caffeinated Seongwon upon the streets of our town, but even though I could have stopped him--he was specifically giving me time to tell him to give the coffee back--I wanted him to have my coffee as he went back out into the cold. What's mine is yours, kiddo. Just maybe next time what's mine might be orange juice or something genuinely good for your health.

And I think that's why the Lord let me be late/unable to find a fast train that morning. If I had left on time, I would have missed my boy.
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2 PM: It has also come to my attention that since Cardsharp-Minsu is nearsighted, he might not have seen me when we passed so close the other day. He also might not have even heard me properly when I said "hi" because I've been told that nearsighted people sometimes focus their hearing in such a way that if someone they can't see says hello, the lack of visual input creates some kind of auditory interference.

Well. I want to give Minsu the benefit of the doubt. You're no longer in the red, dear.
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8 PM: This morning, Seongyo was back. He said he was at a church event on Saturday and that was why I didn't see him.

I couldn't do my planned activity with just Seongyo, so when he set up the Monopoly board, I just joined him. And then, 15 minutes later, Fox-Jinsu rolled in! I hadn't seen him for days upon days, and I knew he was feeling un-engaged and not wanting to enjoy anything, so I restarted me and Seongyo's game to include Jinsu.

Jinsu kept up his cool demeanor and poker face for a while, but soon he was eagerly grabbing the dice and looking anxious over the outcome of every turn.

THEN Yosep, Yoonmo, and Grasshopper-Jeongmin come along. I tell myself this Monopoly has got to stop so we can do our camp activity, but the latecomers are totally invested in watching, and Jinsu doesn't want to leave the classroom even during break. So we played on. The game stretched to fill almost all of our time, but at the end, I got in some English--I told them that to get their candy, they had to write five words in English, then wait for me to try to write them in Korean.

It was marvelous. They stayed in class after the bell rang, and they were all chattering to each other, trying to figure out the best words. Yosep predictably picked "goat meat" and less predictably, "monkey brain". I learned the word for goat out of this. And Yoonmo taught me the word for "bone". Grasshopper-Jeongmin wrote down brand names like Adidas, Northface, and Nepa, so I had to guess at the hangul spelling for those, and my mistakes had the boys in stitches.

I fed them all bread, Jinsu was happy, and life was good. Daesung came into class to visit us, as usual. He let me share his earphones and listen to a Big Bang kpop song I didn't know. Then he showed me has Japanese homework and I made a big fuss over him.

Saw Deokryong in the hallway; smiled and waved. And then I actually saw Byeongyoonie on my way out of school! He was walking toward school, and it occurred to me that I hadn't seen him in two whole weeks, after seeing him basically five days a week for four months. We were on opposite sides of the road so he couldn't hug me, and but once he had passed by I said, "I miss you!" He yelled back, "I miss you, too!"

Annnnnnd I went to Daejeon and bought a pink guitar! Because I want to learn. So I shall. :-)

1/3/14 Christian Seongyo, Minsu, and Daesung Learns Japanese

12 PM:  Another day of camp down! Six more to go, I think?

Arrived at school to find a bunch of workers in the hallways, doing stuff to our ceilings and draping electrical cords through the hallways. Don't know if we're getting a new lighting system or what...I have a very limited understanding of what construction workers and electricians actually do. They fuss with stuff and then stuff gets better, is how it works at home.

In class I discovered just Quiet-Yosep and Food-Seongyo, like yesterday. We did our little mini-mystery for first period, and we collectively died laughing when they tried to rearrange scrambled letters to form English words. They could get the word "Dawn" and the word "is" but the final words were just a slush of fun confusion.

Got 3 loaves of Paris Baguette bread today, all garlic butter bread since that's what the boys prefer. I also brought wet wipes this time, because their hands get really greasy from the bread and it gets all over the Monopoly money.

Seongyo folded his hands and prayed over his food. I asked him if he was a Christian, and when he said yes, I told him that I was, too. It was so sweet to know that my hungry little boy knows something about the Lord, at least.

This morning it hit me where I've seen Wintercamp-Jeongmin before. I knew he was B-ban and I taught him, but I could mentally pinpoint which class he was in. He's in 1-7, 1-8 B with Yosep--this kid is Mettugi! (메뚜기) His nickname is the Korean word for "grasshopper" and I've taught him for four months, but it's hard to notice a little grasshopper when he sits by wildchild Hyunmin. For some reason, I could never remember grasshopper's face, but now I always will.

Yoonmo is a crackup. I wish I could understand more of what he says because he's C-ban and has almost no English words. (I feel like my Korean has improved just this week, from talking so much with my wintercamp boys and listening to them.) Yoonmo's also a kid that stands out because he has a deeper voice, but he's about the size of the smallest 1st-graders. That's got to be difficult for him when his buddy Wintercamp-Jeongmin-Grasshopper is about eight inches taller.

I was talking about nicknames and Yosep said that his nickname is "Goat!" That's why he named his detective agency "Goat History Book". I asked why they call him goat, but he had no answer. However, later during the Monopoly game, he head-butted Yoonmo, a gesture I've never seen any other student do, so maybe that's where the name originated.

Also, the 1st-graders are not really imaginative when it comes to nicknaming their brethren--Grasshopper, Goat, and Rabbit. I'm quite sure that the 1st-grade wing of the school contains children named after every other animal on Noah's Ark, too.

Daesung came into our classroom for a while. I told him again that his brown hair looks nice. I asked if he was taking a wintercamp class, and he is--Japanese!(Interestingly, he told me what he was learning in a mixture of English and Korean: "Japan-eo." In Korean, "eo" can mean "language" and Japanese is "Ilbon-eo". But instead of saying either "Japanese" in English or "Ilbon-eo" in Korean, he went with a mixture--"Japan-eo". Cute. He has spoken some Japanese phrases to me before, but I didn't realize he had an actual interest in the language.

I asked him to speak some Japanese for me, and I parroted the three phrases I know. He said that he would do an "insa" (Korean for "greeting"), then he said a few sentences that were clearly him introducing himself in Japanese. From what I've seen of Japanese dramas, it sounded like his pronunciation was good. He pointed out that we had the same brand of phone--LG--and I sent him home with a half-loaf of bread.

Saw Cardsharp-Minsu on the walk home. He was going to walk right past without saying hi and we were the only two people on the road. I said, "Minsu, hi!" He kept walking as if he hadn't heard me, and I put on my serious-business voice: "Minsu, say hello." He said "hi," back and we went our separate ways.

Gosh, Minsu. Would it kill you to be nice? We are not strangers. I've taught him for four months in regular class and in afterschool, fed him popcorn and chips, given him chocolate when he won games, tried to do nice things for him and involve him in games, only to be met with boundless disinterest. I always greet him happily when I see him, and I don't know why he feels like he's got to act like I'm not a person. In Korea (probably even more so than in America) it is very very bad manners to not greet your teachers when you see them. Kids I don't even know will bow and say hello, so what's up with this kid?

But the morning was good otherwise. The boys in my class were darling and I didn't bore them too badly. When little Laryngitis Seonghoon came into school as I was leaving, I exclaimed, "Cute! You are so cute." It was true, and he laughed and blushed over that. This is the baby who said he wanted to have plastic surgery to fix his nose. I don't know if I can single-handedly alter the course of his self-esteem, but I know it can't hurt to have a woman telling him that his face is perfect just the way it is.
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2:40 PM Hahaha I saw Minsu again. I was going for a walk in town since I'm trying to explore the far corners of our little burgh. At a stop light, I saw him turning the corner across the way to walk ahead of me. Our eyes met--or so I think, because Minsu is nearsighted--but I didn't call out because he was too far away and because of the absurdity of the whole thing. I can go weeks at a time without seeing this boy outside the school walls, and now I see him twice in two different locations?

I feel almost like God was joking with me about Minsu, like "Which child would you least like to see at this moment? Oh, is it Minsu? Blam! There he is, first person you see when you venture out your door. He exists, he has a life of his own, and he's important, whether or not he ever acknowledges your attempts to be nice to him. Even if he never responds, he still matters."

Saw and greeted Diamond-Seonghyun. Was greeted by Taekyoon, who very smoothly said, "Leigh! Hello!" not so subtly dropping the "teacher"part. Taekyoon is going through his talking-to-teacher-is-practice-for-talking-to-real-girls phase. I can hear it in the boys' voices when they're doing this; trying out new intonations, seeing which sounds the coolest. I always respond with a smile and wave at the very least--there's enough rejection waiting for them in this world, they don't need to see anything less than enthusiasm from me when they're trying so hard.

Near my apartment, I ran into another crew of my boys. Seongwonnie circled near on his scooter and shouted, "USA!" I petted his head, then saw Inha, C-class Jongmin and Yeongchang, hanging outside the GS-25. Inha said, "Teacher, I'm hungry," so I took them all inside to buy them kimbap.

There was much shouting and arguing among the boys over what they were going to get, and the cashier lady thought we were the most darling things on the planet, as she has in times past. My taking care of the boys is a fiesta of cuteness--it's like I'm a slightly-bigger baby duckling herding a bunch of baby chicks. An older female teacher at school saw that I was feeding bread to my wintercamp boys, and she melted at the sweetness. I don't know precisely why it's considered cute, but I do know I need to continue to feed the kids whenever I have the chance.
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1/2/14 Songs About Mistletoe, and Paris Baguette Bread

12:00 PM First school-ish day of the new year!

Daesung was playing soccer when I walked up, but he passed his orange soccer ball to me and I kicked it back, in the wrong direction. Then he walked up to play me a few bars of Justin Bieber's "Mistletoe" on his phone, combining his fondness for JB's songs and my fondness for Christmas music.

No one showed up for the first 10 minutes, then Yosep and Seongyo rolled in. I made a small attemtp to work with them on the mystery of the day, and after they solved in in 30 minutes, I didn't bother trying to re-do the mystery for Yoonmo and Wintercamp-Jeongmin when they arrived.

Bought 4 loaves of Paris Baguette bread--two plain, two garlic butter--and one entire loaf was not eaten. The boys were hungry, but they preferred the garlic bread because it's tastier. Seongyo and the others at and ate, but they didn't want to take any home, and I still had enough to share with Taekyoon and Sangwook when they stopped by.
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